Strategies for Improving the Writing Skills of Undergraduate Materials Students

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Strategies for Improving the Writing Skills of Undergraduate Materials Students

Awarded to: David McPhail

Institution: Imperial College, London

Funded in: 2003

Background: Previous surveys of our undergraduate students, our alumni and our staff have indicated that many of the skills that we are currently teaching in our undergraduate course are useful and appropriate ^1,2,3. However, the surveys revealed that written English was an area where much more work was required. Practicing engineers need to be able to write clearly, accurately and succinctly whether they are preparing a short essay, a laboratory report, a project report, a journal paper or a newspaper article. They must be able to communicate in writing to a wide variety of audiences, including those without a technical background. We have found that a significant minority of our students have relatively poor writing ability.

Aims of project: The aim of the project is to review current practice and educational research in the teaching of writing skills for science and engineering students, and to devise teaching strategies to ensure that our graduates achieve a high standard in this field. We shall explore several different teaching strategies including tutorials, lectures, seminars, workshops, one-to-one clinics and assistance from mentors such as PhD students and peers thus establishing a cohort of advisers within the department who will offer help and assistance with writing projects. We shall also explore the use of web-based resources. Our first intention is that of making students aware of the importance of having good writing skills.

Methodology: There are a number of key steps involved in this project:

• To review the available literature
• To conduct a survey of other departments across Imperial College and of other Materials departments across the country to determine how this problem is dealt with elsewhere
• To conduct focus groups with staff and students to discuss the issues
• To implement a new assessment system, whereby poor quality work is returned unmarked to the students for resubmission one week later
• To develop an internal testing protocol and to correlate the test results to the English entrance qualifications of each student

Deliverables: The key deliverable is a soundly-based system of support in
the development of English for our undergraduate students. This will
involve some combination of the strategies mentioned above together with
any other strategies that our studies reveal.

References

1. Skills based teaching in science and engineering degrees: Current practice - best practice, Awarded to: David McPhail, Institution: Imperial College, London, Funded in: 2001 joint funded under FDTL project 'Tutoring Materials'.

2. Incorporating Skills Teaching into Science Degrees: A Review and Case Study, F. Ortona and D McPhail, British Journal of Engineering Education (in press).

3. Incorporating Skills teaching into Science Degrees: A Review and Case Study, DS McPhail, P. Harvey and Francesca Ortona, Proceedings of the 2003 WFEO/ASEE e-Conference, 2003, American Society for Engineering Education, 2003. http://www.asee.org/conferences/e-conference/forum.cfm